Another year over, another year to look forward to. But in the context of technology, the prospect on either side of the timeline is no longer as exciting as it was. The consumer tech industry seems to be on a self-imposed consolidation mode, and life-changing innovation is becoming harder to come by. Still, 2018 will be remembered as the year in which everything from smartphones to speakers becomes more powerful and smarter, as they did last year and as they are supposed to. Interestingly, the tech giants have clearly realised that if great innovation cannot be put into users' hands, it's better to improve their overall product experience.

SAN FRANCISCO: Despite Amazon Alexa being more popular globally, Google Assistant has outperformed her -- and other voice assistants like Apple Siri -- in a test meant to understand the effectiveness of smart speakers. In the 2018 edition of "Smart Speaker IQ Test" by research-driven venture capital firm Loup Ventures, Google Assistant (tested on Home smart speaker) managed to answer 87.9 per cent of the questions correctly -- up from 81.1 per cent in 2017, The Street.com reported on Sunday. Alexa (tested on Amazon Echo smart speaker) saw its accuracy improve to 72.5 per cent from 63.8 per cent and Microsoft Cortana (tested on Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker) improved to 63.4 per cent from 56.4 per cent. Interestingly, Alexa was not the leader in the shopping category -- despite Amazon heading the global e-commerce space -- as Google Home returned more correct answers when asked about product information. "Google Assistant was the only assistant to properly understand all 800 of the questions, but the others were able to understand 99 per cent or more," said the research firm.

SAN FRANCISCO - Millions of users of Amazon's Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command. So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: "Kill your foster parents." Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers' data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Recommender systems have recently attracted many researchers in the deep learning community. The state-of-the-art deep neural network models used in recommender systems are typically multilayer perceptron and deep Autoencoder (DAE), among which DAE usually shows better performance due to its superior capability to reconstruct the inputs. However, we found existing DAE recommendation systems that have similar implementations on similar datasets result in vastly different parameter settings. In this work, we have built a flexible DAE model, named FlexEncoder that uses configurable parameters and unique features to analyse the parameter influences on the prediction accuracy of recommender systems. This will help us identify the best-performance parameters given a dataset. Extensive evaluation on the MovieLens datasets are conducted, which drives our conclusions on the influences of DAE parameters. Specifically, we find that DAE parameters strongly affect the prediction accuracy of the recommender systems, and the effect is transferable to similar datasets in a larger size. We open our code to public which could benefit both new users for DAE -- they can quickly understand how DAE works for recommendation systems, and experienced DAE users -- it easier for them to tune the parameters on different datasets.

The Google Home Hub is already a great deal at $149. While it's not quite as full-featured as the second-generation of Amazon's Echo Show, it's still one of the best smart displays you can buy, with excellent smart home support, a compact design, and support for YouTube streaming. But today Target is making it more desirable than ever: The retailer has slashed the price of the Google Home Hub to $99, but that's not all--you'll also get two Google Home Minis for freeRemove non-product link. Some quick math reveals that this deal will save your whopping $149 on the full retail price of all three. If you've been considering either a Google Home Hub or a couple Google Home Minis, you should pounce on this deal.

Companies today have access to more data about their customers and products than ever before. In fact, most companies only use 1% of their data. But with the help of predictive analytics and AI, companies can dig deeper into their data to provide personalized customer experiences. Predictive analytics use science to predict what will happen in the future--everything from what customers will want to how the market will perform and the biggest trends. Brands can use this information to target the right customers and provide personalized service and recommendations.

There've been several machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, platforms and software in 2018. These platforms, software and tools have impacted every industry like legal, healthcare, automobile, manufacturing and agriculture. There are big brand names like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft that have been investing in such technologies for several years now. They wish to be leaders and trend setters to explore new areas of these technologies. While there are several predictions and expectations from AI and related technologies, I feel there will be 10 predominant trends that will dominate AI.

In Dec. 2018, Amazon launched its Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa compatibility. Sure, it sounds like a goofy premise, especially when juxtaposed with Stanley Kubrick's sprawling vision in his genre-defining sci-fi film "2001: A Space Odyssey." Still, the Alexa Big Mouth Billy Bass touts (or trouts?) a nifty set of skills which posit it as a hybrid of smart home and consumer tech. Back in 2016, developer Brian Kane hacked a Big Mouth Billy Bass and, with Alexa's API, added artificial intelligence (AI) support via Alexa. Now, an official version from Gemmy Industries offers an Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass. Unlike the majority of smart assistants such as Amazon Echo devices or Google Assistant speakers, the Big Mouth Billy Bass comes in a decidedly non-smart home form factor.

Every trip around the sun, we prod, poke, and test hundreds of products here at WIRED. Most of them are just fine. Not boring--few things are truly boring these days. But a lot of what we see doesn't register more than a notch or two on the excite-o-meter. However, every so often, we get a product in our hands that clearly stands out, either by pushing its category forward with some new innovation, or perfecting an established and already noteworthy design.

Surface Go is Microsoft's big bet on a tiny-computer future Lauren Goode, Wired At the top of the list is Wired's detailed piece on the $399 Surface Go, Microsoft's long-rumored smaller Surface device. Smart speakers (and the virtual assistants they house) offer voice control for so many connected devices it's hard to keep count. Those audio gadgets can also assist with a range of questions -- that is, if they can understand you. The Washington Post took a close look at the performance of Alexa and Google Assistant when it comes to understanding people with strong accents. The results show that while these devices are certainly handy and increasingly popular, there's still a lot of room for improvement.